A couple weeks ago I was tasked with building a plugin for Unity that would allow testers and developers to take screenshots, comment and submit tickets to our bug tracker, JIRA. Our instance is in the cloud and behind HTTPS, which are generally great things. I have used JIRA for Gneu, at Blinkx and even a few of my previous game dev related projects; I had even built a few other tools to move tickets into, around and out of JIRA, so it sounded like a reasonable request from Unity.

The culmination of about 4 years of thinking, vetting, exploring and writing code, Deficis has been released on Steam for use in simulating one very dark and bleak vision of what the future holds for humanity. You should take it upon yourself to try to survive as long as you can, consuming the most resources as best you can.

Currently the game is in Early Access, investing its time and energy in honing the concepts and optimizing the flow for proper release. As such, there are currently two roles needing to be contracted out…

It is not likely that this will all be one or two people, and depending on the estimates we may end up extending the offers to multiple parties. For those that are interested, please email [email protected] with your details, links to your portfolio and samples of your work.

For the better part of the last 5 years, there have been complaints about the way that Valve has policed their Steam platform, publishing whatever the hell comes along, passing it on to the consumer at a cost and making money hand over fist. Examples of the trash that has gotten through the silly fake popularity contest that is Steam Greenlight can be found on pretty much every high profile reviewer/critic around… but this game gets pulled from even the Greenlight process, where it is reportedly 7/100?!

Wow.

Folks. It’s a fucking game. Sure, its not tasteful or tactful and I wont be buying it but now im pretty much being forced to reach out and support these developers actively, because unfortunately – it isn’t a matter of just publishing a game. This is a matter of supporting indies and ensuring that when or if I build something ridiculous and terrible someone will be around to reach out and support my own kamikaze run.

An idea that I have typically spends a good couple months tumbling around in my critical thinking cavity, vetting itself as I ride the Duc around the south bay. Eventually though, it will become something I need to put honest thought into, some of its features will need proving and I’ll need to bang out a few prototypes to see how feasible things are. Ill spend another couple months jotting down ideas and trying to hone the idea down, paring off the silly and unnecessary details so I can handle a 5 minute pitch and probably build out a team that is interested in the project.

When I saw Gravity, it was a must and I was immediately working towards piecing together the narrative. Months later I met a couple folks on the UE4 forums and we did some discussions about collaborating on the project, as we had very similar ideas. And months later, it is shelved.

There has been lots of spinning tires over the last few months, but there is a light at the end of the tunnel. I will take this time to officially announce that I have updated Flathead to support V8 3.29. With this update we should all be able to rest assured that the API is more mature and exposes many of the ES6 updates that we have all been waiting for. Although the build is not yet ready for prime time, ill be sharing more info as I get closer to addressing a couple other feature requests – read Mac support.

In other news, I have decided what my next project is going to be – Derelict. Here is the pitch:

Derelict is a first person puzzle solving game that takes place in a 2140, where the world is unified and space faring. You play a character on board one such space faring vehicle when a disaster strikes and you and your crew are left to fend for yourself. Think Survival + Horror, but without the usual monsters.

I am currently in the process of building out my team, so if you are interested or want to take part in the design now would be a great time to reach out.